New York needs more exhibitions like this, low-key and full of delicious things. “Independent Visions: American Drawings and Watercolors” spans the 20th century with 42 works by 10 American artists, reflecting the shifting tensions between figuration and abstraction in the wake of European innovations. The show was speedily assembled, as a substitute for a scheduled one that never materialized. Think of this as a chance to hunt through DC Moore’s closets.

The impact of modernism registers most keenly in the work of the oldest artists: John Marin (1870-1953), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), and Milton Avery (1885-1965). Marin’s notational impression “On Marin Island, Small Point, Maine” (1915) is quietly dazzling. Fractured forms testify to his six years in Paris in the first decade of the century. Robert Delaunay’s dislocated Parisian structures translate into Marin’s disassembled local landscapes; the Woolworth Building became Marin’s Eiffel Tower.

Three small watercolors by Dove – a pioneering Abstractionist and, like Marin, a member of the Stieglitz group – are enough to demonstrate how lyrically he anticipated the New York School. His art fulfilled his ambition “to enjoy life out loud.” Avery’s four landscapes, color scumbled lightly over bare white ground, appear to fine advantage on a small scale. Color relations, not the rhetoric of abstraction, were his sole concern. The work here is so radiantly fresh and feels so contemporary you have to remind yourself that in the 1920s Avery kept company with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Isabel Bishop, Walt Kuhn, and Guy Pene DuBois at the Art Students League.

Thank heaven for Charles Burchfield (1893-1967). An uneasy regionalist, the enchanted melancholy of his natural forms defy categorization. As a boy, he loved copying the work of Charles Dana Gibson. You can see the curve some swing of a Gibson girl in the cursive trees and undulant foliage of “The Open Road in September” (1917).

A student of Miller, Bishop (1902-88) sailed with him and Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) to Europe to study the Old Masters. While modernity ripened in her paint-handling – in her blond depths of invented space and barely defined settings – her work rested on traditional draftsmanship and careful observation. Her love of Renaissance antecedents echoes in the unflattering facial expression of an exquisitely drawn sleeping female head, reminiscent of a ribald Dutch portrait. Every day for 50 years, Bishop commuted from Riverdale to her studio in Union Square to record such urban vignettes as “The Fountain” (1947), a woman drinking from a water fountain in the park.

Marsh’s buxom, high-heeled women have a honkytonks quality, which burlesques the vitality of the drawing on which they are built. “Mr. Broe on the Brooklyn Bridge” (1936), with Broe striding breezily past the down-and-out, typifies the class-consciousness of the Ashcan School and urban genre art at a time of intense ferment over the role of art and artists in society. More surprising is the golden-toned watercolor “Steam Freighter and Barge” (1938), an uncharacteristic subject beautifully depicted.

At an angle to social realism and rejecting its sentimentality, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) depicted the violence of the Civil Rights era with eloquent restraint. Between “Struggle III – Assassination” (1965) and the same-size study for it, you can see Lawrence adjusting his outlined figures for heightened narrative effect. An unfinished gouache carries his favored theme: a man at work among his tools. For Lawrence, builders and the instruments of their craft were symbols of progress, the work of hands an act of hope.

Jared French (1902-89) is included for the obvious reason: French had been a lover of Paul Cadmus, whose drawings of a subsequent lover are on view in the gallery’s smaller exhibition area. A series of male nudes – one studio model drawn in the same position but from different angles – stand below a canopy of leapfrogging males. Holding the center like a keystone is a pair of spread buttocks, more impudent than homoerotic. The study is a dry, schematic suggestion of French’s magical realist compositions. His fully realized pencil portrait of Cadmus (c. 1944) comes closer to the emotional tenor of his painting.

Alongside French are drawings and a recent tempera panel by George Tooker (b. 1920), a student of Marsh who became part of the Cadmus/French circle. Cadmus encouraged him to abandon Marsh’s additions of watercolor wash in favor of strict egg-tempera technique. It was inspired advice. Mr. Tooker’s haunting images of urban alienation drew on simplified quattrocento prototypes. The lean, patient strokes of tempera suit his stylizations and enhance the sense of entrapment that pervades his work. Two silvery pencil drawings from the 1980s display the delicacy of his hand in younger years.

The only letdown is the thin gruel representing Kuhn (1877-1949), one of the principal organizers of the 1913 Armory Show. “Dolores on Sofa” (1929), a cursorily outlined nude, gives no clue to Kuhn’s accomplishment or the sculptural authority of his forms. Kuhn loved vaudeville and the circus, and he painted clowns, showgirls, entertainers, and backstage hands as solemn metaphors of the human condition. (He once earned his living designing and directing stage revues.) His figures descend from Watteau’s Gilles and the commedia dell’arte, through the dancers and cabaret singers of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. A very particular strain of French painting crossed the Atlantic to reside in Walt Kuhn’s costumed cast. If only a hint of it were here.

Until May 14 (724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, 212-247-2111). Prices: $2,500-$185,000.